Marketers eye content produced by machines

dubai — Marketers are transitioning from creative content produced by humans towards content produced by machines, new research commissioned by Criteo has found.

In an IDC White Paper titled ‘Can Machines Be Creative? How Technology is Tranforming Marketing Personalization and Relevance’, experts found that marketers plan to use machines to automate the personalised delivery of creative content for individual consumers via online advertisements. The research showed that 64 per cent of marketers believe optimised message targeting and real-time personalised advertising insertions are primary growth areas where machines will consistently and effectively be delivering business benefits by 2020.

“As smart technologies like data analytics, automation and machine learning continue toward their inevitable convergence, marketing and advertising will experience yet another dynamic shift which will transform the nature of these industries. Machine learning and automated personalization will eventually reach a point when their functionalities will be unified enough to automate the production of personalized creative content and deliver it to consumers in real time,” said Dirk Henke, MD of emerging markets at Criteo.

IDC predicts that spending on AI software for marketing and related businesses will grow at a cumulative average growth rate of 54 per cent worldwide, from around $360 million in 2016 to over $2 billion in 2020.

Although marketers are aware of the value and benefits of machine learning within the context of personalisation, few are currently using it for this purpose. This is due to a lack of internal expertise and trust in machine-learning technology to provide the required level of customer data privacy and brand control. IDC believes that these brand concerns will gradually be assuaged as machine learning becomes more established within online advertising operations, and forecasts that machine learning will become pervasive across all elements of the advertising technology industry supply chain over the next five years to 2022.

Over 34 per cent of advertisers and marketers are using digital technologies to personalise marketing communications. In addition, 33 per cent of marketers are planning to invest in machinelearning technology for communications personalisation, which suggests that latent demand is strong and the market will grow significantly in the coming years.